f the processes employed in the manufacture of wine. The true
explanation, as far as there is any, of the book seems, however, to be
not very difficult to make out, provided that the interpreter does not
endeavour to force a meaning where there very probably is none. The form
of it was pretty well prescribed by the old romances of adventure, and
must be taken as given to Rabelais, not as invented by him for a special
purpose; a war, a quest, these are the subjects of every story in verse
and prose for five centuries, and Rabelais followed the stream. But when
he had thus got his main theme settled, he gave the widest licence of
comment, allusion, digression, and adaptation to his own fancy and his
own intellect. Both of these were typical, and, except for a certain
deficiency in the poetical element, fully typical of the time. Rabelais
was a very learned man, a man of the world, a man of pleasure, a man of
obvious interest in political and ecclesiastical problems. He was
animated by that lively appetite for enjoyment, business, study, all the
occupations of life, which characterised the Renaissance in its earlier
stages, in all countries and especially in France. Nor had science of
any kind yet been divided and subdivided so that each man could only
aspire to handle certain portions of it. Accordingly, Rabelais is
prodigal of learning in season and out of season. But independently of
all this, he had an immense humour, and this pervades the whole book,
turning the preposterous adventures into satirical allegories or half
allegories, irradiating the somewhat miscellaneous erudition with
lambent light, and making the whole alive and fresh to this day. The
extreme coarseness of language, which makes Rabelais difficult to read
now-a-days, seems to have arisen from a variety of causes. The essence
of his book was exaggeration, and he exaggerated in this as in other
matters. His keen appetite for the ludicrous, and a kind of
shamelessness which may have been partly due to individual peculiarity,
but had not a little also to do with his education and studies, inclined
him to make free with a department of thought where ludicrous ideas are,
as it has been said, to be had for the picking up by those whom shame
does not trouble at the expense of those whom it does. But besides all
this, there was in Rabelais a knowledge of human nature, and a faculty
of expressing that knowledge in literary form, in which he is inferior
to Shakespe